Reconstruction

Mayor C. Ray Nagin is way beyond caring whether President Bush mentioned New Orleans in his State of the Union address Tuesday night. "We're 18 months into this thing. I'm tired of complaining and bellyaching," Nagin said Wednesday when asked about the speech at a news conference. The city continues its struggle to recover from Hurricane Katrina, which pummeled New Orleans in August 2005, and some observers thought the absence of Katrina recovery from Bush's speech was telling.

A former civilian contractor for the Defense Department was sentenced Monday to nine years in prison and ordered to forfeit $3.6 million for his role in a bribery and fraud scheme involving contracts to reconstruct Iraq, U.S. officials said. Justice Department officials said Robert J. Stein Jr., 52, of Fayetteville, N.C., also was sentenced to three years of probation after his release from prison.

Sen. Barack Obama criticized the Bush administration Monday for the slow pace of Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts, saying reconstruction no longer seemed to be a White House priority. "There is not a sense of urgency in this administration to get this done," said Obama (D-Ill.), who is weighing a run for president. "You get a sense that will has been lacking in the last several months."

The U.S. government wasted tens of millions of dollars in Iraq reconstruction aid, including scores of unaccounted-for weapons and an unused camp for housing police trainers that has an Olympic-size swimming pool, investigators say. The quarterly audit by Stuart Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, is the latest to paint a grim picture of waste, fraud and frustration in an Iraq war and reconstruction effort that has cost taxpayers more than $300 billion.

The Congressional Black Caucus has asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) to form a new committee on Hurricane Katrina to focus more urgently on rebuilding the Gulf Coast, particularly New Orleans. "The Bush administration has turned its back on our fellow Americans, the victims of the greatest disaster on American soil in our generation," Caucus Chairwoman Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick (D-Mich.) wrote in a letter to Pelosi. A Pelosi spokesman said she would consider the request.

About $10 billion has been squandered by the U.S. government on Iraq reconstruction aid because of contractor overcharges and unsupported expenses, and federal investigators warned Thursday that significantly more taxpayer money was at risk.

A U.S. businessman whose companies made more than $8 million in Iraq reconstruction money through a gifts-for-contracts scheme was sentenced Friday to 46 months in prison. Philip H. Bloom, who has lived in Romania for many years, pleaded guilty last year to bribery and conspiracy to commit money laundering. He admitted that he bribed military personnel with jewelry, computers, cigars and sexual favors from women at his Baghdad villa.

In farming communities along the Syrian border, U.S. Marines work with Iraqis to open health clinics and a job center and to improve trash collection and water delivery. In Fallouja, Marines at a center for displaced people greet Sunni Muslims from Baghdad seeking sanctuary from Shiite Muslim death squads. And along the sniper alley of a freeway that runs between Fallouja and Ramadi, Marines patrol less like warriors than traffic cops.

Stung by criticism that he and his administration had neglected the hurricane-tattered Gulf Coast, President Bush on Thursday made his first visit to the region in six months, proclaiming, "This is a hopeful day." Bush, standing in a muddy lot near new homes in Long Beach, Miss., said: "Part of the reason I've come down is to tell people here in the Gulf Coast that we still think about them in Washington.... Times are changing for the better, and people's lives are improving. And there is hope."

Four years after a raging wildfire all but reduced this small Lake Arrowhead community to ash, only 30 of 336 homes destroyed have been rebuilt, leaving residents to fear that the once-affordable mountain hamlet may never recover.